The Arizona state board of education voted 6-4 to adopt a new set of state science standards at its October 22, 2018, meeting. These standards were recently revised in accordance with recommendations from the Arizona Science Teachers Association to restore the concepts of speciation and common ancestry as well as high school-level standards about climate change, which were previously deleted.
"The revised standards approval received thunderous applause from educators and education advocates sitting in the boardroom," reported the Arizona Republic (October 22, 2018). The vote came after a series of attempts by Superintendent of Public Instruction Diane Douglas to compromise the treatment of evolution in the standards in particular, as NCSE previously reported.
“This is a tremendous victory for Arizona science education," commented NCSE’s executive director Ann Reid. "Only with a scientifically accurate and pedagogically appropriate treatment of evolution and climate change in their state science standards – and in their textbooks and classrooms – will Arizona's public school students be adequately prepared to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century."